Supply Chain

Impact of Supply Chain research

Directed by Prof. Walid Klibi, the Supply Chain Center of Excellence at KEDGE aims to develop new methods, techniques and concepts of organisation and decision making in the areas of Supply Chain management (SCM), operations management and transportation.

Impact on pedagogy

The Supply Chain Center of Excellence members work in close collaboration with Kedge’s programmes to build up this body of knowledge and practice. The impact of this collaboration on the programmes is twofold.

First, center members are involved not only in delivering basic and advanced courses for the programmes but also focus in developing new teaching material in the area of supply chain management as an input to many courses. This has resulted in various case studies and simulation games. Examples include the games SILOG and JISEL that are now used by various programmes in Kedge and other business schools in France. It has also resulted in the writing of books or books chapters including case studies and examples used in the teaching programs.

The collaboration with the programmes has also materialised in professional dissertations and applied research developed by students under the supervision of the Cluster members. This enables students enrolled in the various programmes to learn through research by developing expertise in areas connected to their professional ambitions related to supply chain management while building up their observational, analytical and summative capabilities. For instance, an academic consultancy project is run during the year, led by each group of students and tutored by a researcher, which involves a mission with partner companies. Moreover, the SC Forum, which is a yearly event for practitioners organised by Kedge, is planned with the students that work closely with professors on innovative research topics and organise round tables on them during the event.

With this strong collaboration between the Center and the programmes, two Specialised Masters in Kedge, namely: “MSc in Global Supply Chain Management” and “MSc in International Trade & Logistics”, are in the top of the national SMBG ranking and attract an increasing number of students each year. The Supply Chain Center of Excellence has also developed a specialized track for students of the PGE program; this track comprises eight specialized elective classes.

Tailored programmes for our partner companies

Since 2012, KEDGE has been responsible worldwide for the training of the employees of Orange in the area of supply chain management. This work is conducted in collaboration with the Supply Chain Business School of Orange.

Recently, it has been also responsible for the deployment in Africa of the training of the employees of CMA-CGM in the area of Maritime logistics and SCM.

During this year an applied research-project with the Supply Chain team of Sephora has been initiated.

Impact on Networks

5 Innovation Labs

The research team is structured around 5 Innovation Labs, in order to facilitate a non-academic audience's understanding of the challenges raised, thereby promoting the involvement of the companies concerned:

Interconnected Supply Chains and Smart Cities

Companies must periodically adapt their supply chain networks to changes in their business environment to create value for their stakeholders. They must mainly question the number, location, technology, and mission of their production-distribution facilities; as well as their choice of suppliers and subcontractors. In addition, their supply chain networks must be sufficiently robust and resilient to cope with any plausible future, including catastrophic events. They have also to consider in their strategies promising supply chain innovations such as digitalization and connected objects, as well as disruptive business models based on sharing economy and Physical Internet-enabled. Furthermore, with the advent of smart cities initiatives, the need of interconnected, digital and collaborative supply chains become crucial.

Supply Chain and Complexity Management

Understanding today’s environment implies in understanding the complex business environment which, in its turn, implies in understanding the connections among key players. Information sharing (correct or not) at high speeds and far reaching is the underlying support for all this complexity. On the demand side, customers are connected in a web of social networks and information sharing. On the institutional side, supply chains are not chains anymore but a highly interconnected web of partners and competitors. The resulting picture is one of increasing variability of important parameters and augmented risk when making decisions.

Our focus is on creating mechanisms that shed light on the effect of the complexity mentioned above on the main drivers of supply chain performance. Moreover, we want to capture new ways of describing demand variability under the effect of social networks.

The final product should be the one of being able to understand complex networks and their effects on profitability and optimal supply chain design decisions.

Our projects revolve around 3 main themes:

Develop simple heuristics that allow managers to follow the solution process in order to develop intuition;

Develop measures for complexity that are firm and industry independant, demonstrate the relevance of these measures, and understand the implications of complexity;

Understand how topology of social networks affects long range supply chain strategy, assuming that once a product is available, consumers influence each other via their social networks.

Supply Chain Control &amp; Business Analytics

Nowadays, the business environment is in constant change which implies the multiplication of major events and disruptions that strike supply chains at all levels. Furthermore, with the constant development of new practices/technologies and the importance of the digital, many new risks appear that may strike companies’ supply chains and lead to increased costs and poor customer service. Under this context, supply chain control is becoming the key to reduce the risks and hence achieve a cost reduction and customer service level increase at all levels. It is important to note that the supply chain control can be achieved by using not only control towers and new collaborative practices based on information visibility between all the actors but also through the use of new tools like Business Analytics that lead to an optimisation of the decisions from the strategic to the operational levels.

Sustainable Supply Chain

Supply Chain sustainability has become a major corporate responsibility over years. Corporations are increasingly putting more importance and resources to this as an investment into the future. Along with sustainability issues, the ethical standards have gained more importance in the corporate arena. Reducing the adverse social, environmental and economic impacts has become the primary challenge to the supply chain function. In the present years this is becoming more and more crucial for the long term survival of businesses. The complex terrain of new and emerging markets make it very complex for the corporations. External drivers like legislations, customers are increasingly making the companies to take sustainability issues in their main stream endeavor of corporate policy making.

Transportation Economics

As a dominant volume of international trade is conducted at sea, maritime logistics greatly impacts the global economy and companies’ competiveness. Globalization with components shipped from multiple locations has been made possible, to a large degree, by the development of cost-effective and timely ocean shipping services. Nevertheless, the ocean transportation system is nowadays an unprofitable industry, which has led shipping companies to restructure their services. These changes impact any company involved in international trade as they imply significant changes in network design, pricing, delivery reliability, in-transit and safety stocks, contractual agreements, Greenhouse Gas emissions and safety or security concerns.

Contact: Pierre Cariou

Conferences and events

24 March 2017: Forum Supply Chain

2016: The 6th edition of the ILS ("TheInternational Conference on Information Systems, Logistics and Supply Chain") Conference organised in Bordeaux 1st to 4th June 2016. ILS 2016 event gathered more than 150 participants from more than 30 countries and included a doctoral students competition as well as an industrial day (http://ils2016conference.com/presentation/)

2014: The 10th edition of the RIRL Conference was hosted by Kedge on May 20-21, 2014 in Marseille in collaboration with researchers from the University of Nantes (France).

2014: Kedge Business School also hosted the ATRS (Air Transport Research Society) international conference from July 17 to July 20, 2014 in Bordeaux.

Case studies

Airbus: Collaboration as vector of innovation and competitiveness (Fr)

Greenmodal Transport: How to organise innovative and sustainable transport? (Fr)